While reading this report on rust, which chews up and often destroys everything from cars to pipes to bridges, we were reminded of the Buddhist emphasis on impermanence. Nothing lasts forever, everything must pass.
We also thought of the Japanese concept of wu-wei which honors the scars and bruises and cracks in objects. Most of us don't pay much attention to these things, but in Rust, journalist Jonathan Waldman spends time following Alyssha Eve Csuk around Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where she has taken nearly 30,000 shots of rust. He writes of her work:
"When she zooms in on metal, she captures speckled reds, lumpy yellow waves, green crests, serated blues, orange slashes. One print looks like a Japanese watercolor, another like Japanese calligraphy. My favorite, which I nearly drooled on, suggested a think cascade of the purest blue water over the darkest Yosemite granite."
Going right along with our propensity to make a war out of every battle, Waldman looks at the process of corrosion and tallies up its destructiveness:
• It has knocked down bridges.
• It has caused deaths in nuclear power plants.
• It has shut down the nation's largest oil pipeline.
• It has rendered military jets and ships unfit for service.
• It causes hundreds of explosions in manholes.
• It blows up washing machines.
• It clogs the nozzles of fire sprinkler heads.
• It sparks house fires.
• It damages fuel tanks and engines.
• It destroys highway guardrails.
• It spreads like cancer in concrete.
No wonder the Pentagon describes rust as "the pervasive menace." Rust costs the United States $437 billion a year, and the cost will keep going up in the future.
With creative elan Waldman also takes a jaunt with a high tech robot looking for rust in the Alaskan pipeline; he introduces us to engineers and bureaucrats who must deal with the chemical reaction between oxygen and iron; he spends some time with an entrepreneur who expends his energy on antirust products; and he calls for stricter regulations on the canning industry.
This one-target book hits the mark by giving us a rousing overview and something important to think about.
